Easy-Bake, easy does it

What starter recipes don't tell us about the culinary learning process

Like many people, my first attempts at cooking were all about treats—specifically, baking. I was a big fan of the dump-and-stir box mix (hello, Ghiradelli fudge brownie mix, still a foolproof route to great brownies), and an even bigger fan of the premade roll of Nestle Toll House cookie dough. When I was about twelve, I went to a friend’s house and we didn’t even bother making cookies—we sliced open the bright yellow plastic roll, sliced the dough with a butter knife, and proceeded to eat the entire batch of uncooked dough while watching her VHS of Empire Records for the umpteenth time. Perhaps because of the resulting stomach ache, I soon turned to savory cooking, albeit with uneven results. Around age 15, my sister and I decided to take over cooking for our parents one evening—my sister (about 8 at the time) pulled out a box of Duncan Hines cake mix, while I selected a pasta with sauteed garlic and red peppers. While the pasta cooked, I looked at the recipe, requiring “2 cloves minced garlic” and pulled out two heads, not knowing the difference between a head and a clove. This seems like a lot, I thought as I peeled the cloves from one head, then another. But then again, garlic is in the recipe title, so it must be right. It wasn’t until I saw my parents grimace with the first bite that I realized something had gone horribly, horribly wrong. Needless to say, we had cake for dinner that night.

What exactly is an easy recipe? What would you hand to a total kitchen novice for their first-ever recipe? In her brilliant new book, The Secret of Cooking, the British food writer Bee Wilson tells us that before cookbooks were in widespread circulation (not until the late sixteenth century), recipes were found in volumes called “books of secrets.” These texts, highly respected and regarded as works of science, contained everything from formulas for making soap and medicine to home-brewing strategies to recipes for bread, cheese, and cured meats. “In these books,” Wilson writes, “cooking is seen as just one secret among many that a person would need to know in order to lead a happier and more comfortable life and to cheat death for as long as possible.” They also suggest, as I see it, the most certain path towards self-sufficiency, both physical and emotional—a mode of insurance against a constant state of precarity and uncertainty.

Yet what we make when we start assembling an arsenal of culinary skills has everything to do with what we’ve been told is worth cooking—foundational dishes of not only basic nutrition, but also socially-sanctioned tastes. Listicles on the “8 Recipes Every Real-Life Grown-Up Should Master” or the “7 Easy Meals for Newly Minted Adults,” just to name a few, name-check a huge range of things that reach well beyond basic meal prep, like homemade ricotta, pan-fried pork chops, “restaurant-quality” Caesar salad. Most starter cookbooks don’t focus on the technique-driven elements of cooking that help you become less recipe-dependent, or teach you how to shop for and use kitchen knives, make a case for why a roast chicken is a greater sign of culinary independence than, say, a well-tweaked bowl of ramen noodles. They assume a significant degree of existing culinary capital, an existing alignment with what is generally agreed to be tasty—salty, sweet, fatty flavors and pronounced textural contrasts—and orient those towards a narrow slice of the (almost exclusively Western) culinary canon. These cookbooks also assume a significant amount of financial and scheduling flexibility for the home cook, framing the concept of a from-scratch pot of beans as an ideal Sunday project, without ever unpacking the idea that it might be more cost- and time-efficient to go for the canned stuff. As a result, our idea of what constitutes grown-up cooking is rooted in an assumption of social, financial, and cultural privilege. As we arbitrarily master homemade bolognese and pasta sauces because that’s what good “scratch cooking” is, other dishes, including those with an element of semi-homemadeness, fall by the wayside.

At a conference presentation I gave several months ago, someone in attendance asked me a question: “I hear all the time that it’s so important for me to know how to cook. But why?” It was such a beautiful, simple question, and one that I didn’t have an answer for then, or now. But I do know that treating home cooking as the solution to all of modern life’s problems doesn’t make it any easier to pull off, and doesn’t unpack the moral load that cooking has taken on as a kind of proof of personal fitness. Moreover, putting so much emphasis on grown-up dinner party-ready dishes undermines the idea of the sustaining meal for every day—the bowl of well-cooked oatmeal, the batch of perfectly steamed rice, a quick stir-fry of vegetables and canned beans with a few spoonfuls of salsa. In her debut cookbook, Start Here, the chef and culinary editor Sohla El-Waylly writes about her path to culinary success as follows:

“My confidence in the kitchen comes from failing. … Failing in the kitchen is an opportunity to zigzag, reassess, and think creatively to fix your failure into something delicious (or at least edible, because sometimes that’s enough). The thing about failing is, the more you fail the less scary it’ll feel.”

To paraphrase an adage from graduate school, the best dinner is a done dinner…however you get to it.

If only we could shake up our pedagogical approach to cooking to deemphasize the product, and instead focus on a deeper understanding, one that would link the recipe or dish to the larger value of cooking as proof of process. Philosophers pontificate on the concept of “knowledge-how”—the ability to make things as proof of a deliberate learning process—but they don’t often connect know-how to the broader concept of knowledge-that, and its more abstract cousin, knowledge-why, both of which require the internationalization of facts—i.e. that when chopped onions cook over slow heat, the enzymes released break up their sulfur molecules and eventually transition from sharp acidity to subtle sweetness. Knowing how to caramelize onions will help you caramelize onions; knowledge-that changes the way you approach the onion in the first place. As you’ll know from reading this newsletter, I don’t like to put too much stock in the science of cooking as its raison d'être, but explaining why something becomes delicious is a much more effective enticement to preparing something than a simple command to do so. It also helps convert student cooks into teacher cooks, as they become masters of their own epistemological experience. An Easy-Bake oven may be a blast when working with prepared mixes, but the method behind the light bulb cooking process is really what gets one’s cake rising.

Recommendation: I’m so pleased to have two new books on my to-read pile: first, Dwight Garner’s memoir The Upstairs Delicatessen, linking his lifelong love of reading and eating. (Yes, obviously this was designed in a laboratory just to satisfy my nerdy food whims. But if you need a taste of why I’m so excited to read this, just check out Garner’s Grub Street Diet from September. It’s immediately in my top ten entries for this column.) I’m also thrilled to start reading Fuschia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet, a deep dive into the history of Chinese cooking. In each chapter, she uses the exploration of a single dish to dive into the rich, multi-pronged history of Chinese gastronomy and culture. Eager to dive into both as soon as possible.

The Perfect Bite: I relished the opportunity to step out on Wednesday afternoon for a bowl of noodle soup (still fighting a cold from last week), and loaded up on tom yum goong. A classic Thai soup, tom yum is a hot-and-sour blend where the richness of the broth comes from tons of galangal (ginger’s more citrusy cousin), lemongrass, lime juice, and makrut lime leaves, as well as generous spoonfuls of nam prik pao (Thai chile paste). Exactly what I needed to wake up my senses as the chill in the air sets in.

Cooked & Consumed: I’ve got about 20 recipes flagged in Molly Baz’s latest cookbook, More is More, and each one is more exciting to contemplate than the next, as she plays fast and loose with a million flavors and textures in every dish. Our first one out of the gate was a short-rib stew, infused with almost a cup of hot sauce and so much apple cider vinegar it made my eyes water. Yet the finished product (filled out with shredded greens and sliced acorn squash) was a tangy, aromatic stew that reminded me of the best of Carolina-style barbecue. (I’m glad I took Baz’s advice to have cornbread on the side—the perfect accompaniment.)